“We have done extensive polling on a carbon tax. It all sucks.”
– John Podesta (Clinton campaign manager), January 2015.
“[A carbon tax is] lethal in the general [election], so I don’t want to support one.”
– Robby Mook (Clinton campaign manager), June 2015.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign would not touch it. Neither would be Democratic Platform in 2016. “[Hillary] Clinton has no intention of being suckered into a political disaster by advocating a carbon tax,” stated Democrat consultant
Paul Bledsoe in July 2016.
If Republicans will come out for it and vote for it, that’s a different matter. But until that happens, the Democrats should have nothing to do with it, because it’s political poison.” –
So if attention-hungry, anti-Trump Republicans (such as Mitt Romney) want to make a carbon tax an issue, be careful.…
Continue Reading“I believe there’s a change in weather, and I think it changes both ways. Don’t forget, it used to be called ‘global warming,’ that wasn’t working, then it was called ‘climate change.’ Now it’s actually called ‘extreme weather,’ because with extreme weather you can’t miss.” (Donald Trump to Piers Morgan, “ITV Good Morning Britain Show,” June 5, 2019)
President Donald Trump deserves a prize from classical liberals for his position on climate change. In fact, I challenge any conservative, libertarian, or classical liberal to offer a better example of courage in the face of government activism and political correctness in recent times.
In terms of energy policy, despite negative international trade issues (see
(here, here, and here for my tariff misgivings), President Trump is arguably the most free-market energy President in U.S.…
Some economists have objected that conventional measures of the social cost of carbon (SCC) fail adequately to account for the possibility of catastrophic climate change. However, such criticisms are based on assumptions concerning the probability of catastrophe that have no empirical basis. A recent attempt to estimate the SCC by surveying experts to find out what they would be willing to pay to avert catastrophe is so riddled with defects as to be of no utility.
Editor note” In his underappreciated analysis, “Climate Change, Catastrophe, Regulation, and the Social Cost of Carbon” (Reason Foundation: March 2018), Julian Morris presented a major case against pricing or otherwise regulating the emission of carbon dioxide (CO2).
In a 74-page painstaking study, Morris (pp. 49–53) dealt with the “fat tail” argument of MIT economist, Robert Pindyck, who sought to reframe the debate in terms of what experts thought to be the worst-case (“catastrophic”) outcome from the human influence on climate.…
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